RoboHelp 11 - Cloud Collaboration

Sharing Topics and Other Resources

Resource Manager allows you to share images, snippets, master pages, topics and multimedia files such as SWF with other authors and other projects.

You can make the Resource Manager pod work in various ways:

• You can define a single common location where all resources would be shared.
• You can define multiple locations for your resources.
• You can define different locations for storing each resource type.
• New in RoboHelp 11 is that in addition to network locations you can now include the popular cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Sky Drive, and SharePoint sites. In the example below, both Dropbox and Google Drive have been added as Shared Locations.
  
  

RoboHelp establishes a link between any resources in the Resource Manager and scans both the Project and Resource Manager locations periodically to see if anything has changed. If an asset is changed in some way, RoboHelp  notifies you of the change.

Shown below is the path of a drag of a topic from the Project Manager to the Resource Manager. Note that the colour turns green as the link is made. There is also a visual preview of the graphic which happens to be included in the topic.

When the author makes a change in the topic and saves, the icons and topic title turn red to indicate they are out of sync.

You are able to easily update shared resources in the project by selecting them and clicking Sync. Additionally, you are able to control the frequency for comparing any linked resources and comparing what is shown in the Resource Manager with the location it points to.

Resource Manager is specific to each installation of Adobe RoboHelp. To see this in actual use you will need to configure the Resource Manager to point to one or more folders where common content is located. Then use an asset presented inside the Resource Manager pod by dragging from the pod to the project.

Summary

This will be a useful new feature, especially where teams of authors are linked to different networks or have to work outside the company network. Now they can use cloud based storage.